An Efficient Bit Plane X-OR Algorithm for Irreversible Image Steganography

The science of hiding secret information in another message is known as Steganography; hence the presence of secret information is concealed. It is the method of hiding cognitive content in same or another media to avoid recognition by the intruders. This paper introduces new method wherein irreversible steganography is used to hide an image in the same medium so that the secret data is masked. The secret image is known as payload and the carrier is known as cover image. X-OR operation is used amongst mid level bit planes of carrier image and high level bit planes of data image to generate new low level bit planes of the stego image. Recovery process includes the X-ORing of low level bit planes and mid level bit planes of the stego image. Based on the result of the recovery, subsequent data image is generated. A RGB color image is used as carrier and the data image is a grayscale image of dimensions less than or equal to the dimensions of the carrier image. The proposed method greatly increases the embedding capacity without significantly decreasing the PSNR value

Secret Image Sharing Using Grayscale Payload Decomposition and Irreversible Image Steganography

To provide an added security level most of the existing reversible as well as irreversible image steganography schemes emphasize on encrypting the secret image (payload) before embedding it to the cover image. The complexity of encryption for a large payload where the embedding algorithm itself is complex may adversely affect the steganographic system. Schemes that can induce same level of distortion, as any standard encryption technique with lower computational complexity, can improve the performance of stego systems. In this paper we propose a secure secret image sharing scheme, which bears minimal computational complexity. The proposed scheme, as a replacement for encryption, diversifies the payload into different matrices which are embedded into carrier image (cover image) using bit X-OR operation. A payload is a grayscale image which is divided into frequency matrix, error matrix, and sign matrix. The frequency matrix is scaled down using a mapping algorithm to produce Down Scaled Frequency (DSF) matrix. The DSF matrix, error matrix, and sign matrix are then embedded in different cover images using bit X-OR operation between the bit planes of the matrices and respective cover images. Analysis of the proposed scheme shows that it effectively camouflages the payload with minimum computation time

A New Parallel Message-distribution Technique for Cost-based Steganography

This paper presents two novel approaches to increase performance bounds of image steganography under the criteria of minimizing distortion. First, in order to efficiently use the images' capacities, we propose using parallel images in the embedding stage. The result is then used to prove sub-optimality of the message distribution technique used by all cost based algorithms including HUGO, S-UNIWARD, and HILL. Second, a new distribution approach is presented to further improve the security of these algorithms. Experiments show that this distribution method avoids embedding in smooth regions and thus achieves a better performance, measured by state-of-the-art steganalysis, when compared with the current used distribution

A reversible high embedding capacity data hiding technique for hiding secret data in images

As the multimedia and internet technologies are growing fast, the transmission of digital media plays an important role in communication. The various digital media like audio, video and images are being transferred through internet. There are a lot of threats for the digital data that are transferred through internet. Also, a number of security techniques have been employed to protect the data that is transferred through internet. This paper proposes a new technique for sending secret messages securely, using steganographic technique. Since the proposed system uses multiple level of security for data hiding, where the data is hidden in an image file and the stego file is again concealed in another image. Previously, the secret message is being encrypted with the encryption algorithm which ensures the achievement of high security enabled data transfer through internet.Comment: IEEE Publication format, International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security, IJCSIS, Vol. 7 No. 3, March 2010, USA. ISSN 1947 5500, http://sites.google.com/site/ijcsis

End-to-end Trained CNN Encode-Decoder Networks for Image Steganography

All the existing image steganography methods use manually crafted features to hide binary payloads into cover images. This leads to small payload capacity and image distortion. Here we propose a convolutional neural network based encoder-decoder architecture for embedding of images as payload. To this end, we make following three major contributions: (i) we propose a deep learning based generic encoder-decoder architecture for image steganography; (ii) we introduce a new loss function that ensures joint end-to-end training of encoder-decoder networks; (iii) we perform extensive empirical evaluation of proposed architecture on a range of challenging publicly available datasets (MNIST, CIFAR10, PASCAL-VOC12, ImageNet, LFW) and report state-of-the-art payload capacity at high PSNR and SSIM values

Combined Image Encryption and Steganography Algorithm in the Spatial Domain

In recent years, steganography has emerged as one of the main research areas in information security. Least significant bit (LSB) steganography is one of the fundamental and conventional spatial domain methods, which is capable of hiding larger secret information in a cover image without noticeable visual distortions. In this paper, a combined algorithm based on LSB steganography and chaotic encryption is proposed. Experimental results show the feasibility of the proposed method. In comparison with existing steganographic spatial domain based algorithms, the suggested algorithm is shown to have some advantages over existing ones, namely, larger key space and a higher level of security against some existing attacks.Comment: 6 page

On the usefulness of information hiding techniques for wireless sensor networks security

A wireless sensor network (WSN) typically consists of base stations and a large number of wireless sensors. The sensory data gathered from the whole network at a certain time snapshot can be visualized as an image. As a result, information hiding techniques can be applied to this "sensory data image". Steganography refers to the technology of hiding data into digital media without drawing any suspicion, while steganalysis is the art of detecting the presence of steganography. This article provides a brief review of steganography and steganalysis applications for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Then we show that the steganographic techniques are both related to sensed data authentication in wireless sensor networks, and when considering the attacker point of view, which has not yet been investigated in the literature. Our simulation results show that the sink level is unable to detect an attack carried out by the nsF5 algorithm on sensed data

An Improved Reversible Data Hiding in Encrypted Images using Parametric Binary Tree Labeling

This work proposes an improved reversible data hiding scheme in encrypted images using parametric binary tree labeling(IPBTL-RDHEI), which takes advantage of the spatial correlation in the entire original image but not in small image blocks to reserve room for hiding data. Then the original image is encrypted with an encryption key and the parametric binary tree is used to label encrypted pixels into two different categories. Finally, one of the two categories of encrypted pixels can embed secret information by bit replacement. According to the experimental results, compared with several state-of-the-art methods, the proposed IPBTL-RDHEI method achieves higher embedding rate and outperforms the competitors. Due to the reversibility of IPBTL-RDHEI, the original plaintext image and the secret information can be restored and extracted losslessly and separately

High Capacity Lossless Data Hiding in JPEG Bitstream Based on General VLC Mapping

JPEG is the most popular image format, which is widely used in our daily life. Therefore, reversible data hiding (RDH) for JPEG images is important. Most of the RDH schemes for JPEG images will cause significant distortions and large file size increments in the marked JPEG image. As a special case of RDH, the lossless data hiding (LDH) technique can keep the visual quality of the marked images no degradation. In this paper, a novel high capacity LDH scheme is proposed. In the JPEG bitstream, not all the variable length codes (VLC) are used to encode image data. By constructing the mapping between the used and unused VLCs, the secret data can be embedded by replacing the used VLC with the unused VLC. Different from the previous schemes, our mapping strategy allows the lengths of unused and used VLCs in a mapping set to be unequal. We present some basic insights into the construction of the mapping relationship. Experimental results show that most of the JPEG images using the proposed scheme obtain smaller file size increments than previous RDH schemes. Furthermore, the proposed scheme can obtain high embedding capacity while keeping the marked JPEG image with no distortion

Wavelet Based Authentication/Secret Transmission Through Image Resizing(WASTIR)

The paper is aimed for a wavelet based steganographic or watermarking technique in frequency domain termed as WASTIR for secret message or image transmission or image authentication. Number system conversion of the secret image by changing radix form decimal to quaternary is the pre-processing of the technique. Cover image scaling through inverse discrete wavelet transformation with false Horizontal and vertical coefficients are embedded with quaternary digits through hash function and a secret key. Experimental results are computed and compared with the existing steganographic techniques like WTSIC, Yuancheng Lis Method and Region-Based in terms of Mean Square Error (MSE), Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Image Fidelity (IF) which show better performances in WASTIR.Comment: 10 Page Journal Paper, Sipi